Cecilia Elena Rouse is the ninth president of Brookings. She was previously the Dean of the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA) and the Lawrence and Shirley Katzman and Lewis and Anna Ernst Professor in the Economics of Education. Her primary research interest is in labor economics, with a focus on the economics of education.
Rouse is a member of the National Academy of Education as well as a senior editor of The Future of Children, a policy journal published by SPIA and the Brookings Institution, and a member of the editorial board of the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy. Rouse also serves on the boards of the Council of Foreign Relations, the University of Rhode Island, the Pennington School, the National Bureau of Economic Research, and is an independent director of the T. Rowe Price Funds. She is the founding director of the Princeton University Education Research Section, and was a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. In 1998–99 she served a year in the White House at the National Economic Council and from 2009–2011 served as a member of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. More recently, she was the Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Biden from 2021–2023.
Rouse received her BA in economics from Harvard University in 1986 and a PhD in economics from Harvard University in 1992.
